The Tree of Life (Cannes 2011)

Terrence Malick's latest opus The Tree of Life is a film of lofty ambition and uncompromised directorial vision, an "experience" over a slice of mainstream entertainment. It's also highly uncommercial and, despite the presence of Brad Pit and Sean Penn, will likely be too difficult to win over the multiplex crowds or Oscar voters. Penn appears in limited screen time as Jack, a man wading through the present with doubt and uncertainty. His recollections of a childhood spent in Texas with a stern father (Brad Pitt) and compassionate mother (Jessica Chastain) form the bulk of Tree of Life, but that barely gets close to scratching the surface - there quite simply is no other movie like it.

The off-screen death of Jack's brother fires the story back in time, right to the very start as Malick visualises the explosions that birth the universe. Soundtracked to a classical score, the cosmos expands with dinosaurs, volcanoes and asteroids all figuring in a long, breathtaking sequence showing the evolution of Planet Earth. Malick's Badlands had the reclusive filmmaker gliding effortlessly through a small '50s American town looking for conflict, and here it's a similar story as he takes the point of view of young Jack (Hunter McCracken). As signified in the trailer, nature and grace, Jack's father and mother, "wrestle" inside of him. Dad is a disciplinarian who believes fierceness is the key to getting ahead in life, while his mother values tolerance and love. Pitt strides miles away from the heartthrob persona, his Mr O'Brien goading his sons to punch him in a bid to toughen them up. Chastain, strawberry-haired like Sissy Spacek's Holly Sargis, is luminous as the mother directly at odds with her husband's parenting methods.

The Tree of Life may be abstract and unconventional, but it's staggeringly beautiful and admirably demands its audience to think long and hard about what's being presented. Perhaps the closest comparison is 2001: A Space Odyssey, although only time will tell if Malick's decades-in-the-making meditation on existence gains the masterpiece status afforded to Stanley Kubrick's space epic. Love it or hate it, The Tree of Life won't be forgotten in a hurry.